This invention relates to interlacing rasters in a laser printer, and more particularly, to interlace formatting in a hyperacuity printer.
In a typical multiple beam ROS (Raster Output Scanner) system, interlacing is accomplished by assigning individual data rasters in the page buffer memory to the laser channels modulo the number of channels, and with some offset determined by registration error and beam spacing on the recording medium. With this scheme, several rasters, corresponding to the number of channels, are delivered simultaneously and at a fixed raster pitch corresponding to the scan pitch. In that case, any change to the output resolution or the assignment of rasters would be difficult if not impossible to control.
Therefore, it would be advantageous to have a system whereby the interlacing is done independently of the system providing the image. Once the interlacing of the image data is independent of the source, resolution conversion, registration error correction, and channel reassignment could be performed easily and without major system modifications. Furthermore, such a system could require the image provider to provide only one raster at a time, thereby decreasing its complexity.